The present invention relates to the field of air bag restraint systems for protecting vehicle occupants against severe injuries when the vehicle is involved in an impact type accident.
In an air bag system installation for a conventional left-hand drive vehicle, the vehicle occupant sitting in the right front seating position may be protected by an air bag that is deployable from a housing in the dashboard or instrument panel. The vehicle operator or driver sitting in the left front seating position, the position behind the steering wheel, may be protected by a mini-air bag system integrated in the steering wheel structure.
The placement of the air bag module for the protection of the occupant in the right-hand seating position is preferably at the right outboard end of the instrument panel, in the area that in a non-air bag vehicle is occupied by a storage compartment, more popularly called a glove box. This is because the instrument panel from the driver's end to a point well past the center is occupied by the vehicle instrumentation such as the speedometer, odometer, fuel gauge, temperature gauge and the like, the radio, the heating and ventilation controls, and the ashtray. This presents no problem in a vehicle having only two front seating positions such as a vehicle having bucket seats. In a vehicle in which the front seat is a bench type seat able to accommodate a person between the vehicle operator and the right front passenger, the occupant of the center seating position may not be afforded any protection since the center seating position would be located between the driver's air bag and the right front seating position air bag.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,617,073 issued Nov. 2, 1971 to Landsman et al for an "Automobile Safety System", discloses an air bag system in which the air bags are deployed from receivers located on the side post alongside the windshield, and also in receptacles along the interior of the doors across the body of the driver and the passengers.
In this proposed construction and arrangement, the center seating position is substantially aligned with the ends of the bags and provides minimal resistance to forward movement of the center seating position occupant. The bags that are ejected or deployed from the receivers in the vehicle door are not backed up after inflation by the vehicle instrument panel or dashboard structure.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,784,223 issued to D. P. Hass on Jan. 8, 1974 for a "Safety Apparatus", discloses an elongate air bag that appears to be able to span the center and right-hand seating positions to restrain the occupants against forward movement during an accident. It appears, however, that the air bags are stored in a chamber which extends across the full width of the vehicle and thus would not be adaptable to a system in which the collapsed air bag would be stored in a housing located in the instrument panel area usually occupied by the glove box. With the current trend toward the downsizing of vehicles that is now in vogue, the packaging of the necessary air bag system components for a system as proposed by this patent would present great difficulty.